Snippet from SNOW LIKE ASHES
Just can’t wait for SLA? Here’s a nice little snippet from Chapter Three to quench your snowy thirst! This is a flashback scene that Meira remembers moments before she is supposed to sneak into a Spring city.
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When I was eight, we moved our camp once again to make it harder for Angra to track us—this time, to Autumn. Until then, my life had been no bigger than the perimeters of our sad little camps in the Eldridge Forest. We passed through Autumn’s capital, Oktuber, on our way to their southern forests, filling our carts and loading our horses with supplies.
Autumn was as similar to the foliage-heavy Eldridge as a snowflake is to a flame. The dense humidity of the Eldridge was nonexistent in Autumn’s dry coolness, its yellow-and-red forests sleepy and crunchy and colored with warmth. Oktuber was a maze of rickety barns and tents in maroon, azure, and sunshine orange, with the crystalline blue sky gleaming above, a sharp and beautiful contrast to this kingdom’s earth tones. But it was the Autumnians themselves who left me gaping—they were beautiful.
Their hair hung in tendrils as dark as the night sky, swaying in the dust kicked up from the roads that wove through Autumn’s tent cities. Their skin glistened the same coppery brown as the leaves on some of their trees, only where the leaves were crinkled and dry, the Autumnians’ faces were perfectly creamy.
I touched my own skin, as pale as the clouds drifting over us, and ran my fingers across the cap covering my blindingly white hair. My entire life, I had been surrounded only by the other Winterian escapees. It had never occurred to me that anyone might look different, but as I gazed at black eyes set in lush brown skin, I wished for my skin to be that pretty shade, and for my blue eyes to be a dark mystery too.
I told my wish to Alysson, who was tasked with keeping Mather and me out of trouble while everyone else gathered supplies. Her brow pinched in the wake of my admission. “The world is full of lovely people, Meira. I bet somewhere there is an Autumnian girl wanting to have skin the color of snow just as you want skin the color of earth.”
My gaze flicked around, but I didn’t see anyone watching us, at least not with the same yearning with which I watched them. I tugged at my cap. “Then why do we have to hide?”
Alysson’s hand went to her own hair, wrapped up in a blue length of fabric. In retrospect, hiding our white hair didn’t do much to keep people from realizing who we were—if anything, it only made them look at us twice, noting first our hats or fabric-wrapped heads, then our pale skin and blue eyes and how wholly out of place we were. But Sir never backed down in his insistence that we needed to at least try to disguise ourselves, lest Angra get word of our location.
After a deep inhale, Alysson touched my cheek, her fingers cool. “You won’t have to hide forever, sweetheart. Someday our features will blend in, not stand out.”
I doubt she meant blending into Spring.
